Enterprise to Grid in Atlanta

I have been working toward the Grid Interop event in Atlanta this week and have had little time to post. This is the second Grid Interop event,sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) and organized by the GridWise Architectural Council. Aside from my own presentation there, there are numerous events and reports that I am as associated with that also have their end point there.

One of these is an open work shop on standards for e-Commerce, the Enterprise, and the Grid being hosted by OASIS and NIST in the evening. We hope to come out of it with a common road map for the key standards ahead. All are welcome, not just conference attendees. I thank Clasma for their assistance and the venue.

Tuesday, 11 November, 7:00pm-8:30pm
Hyatt Regency, Peachtree Center, Atlanta

Facilitated by William Cox, Cox Software Architects LLC and OASIS Technical Advisory Board

Other planned attendees (confirmations pending):

Toby Considine, University of North Carolina and OASIS Technical Advisory Board
Carol Geyer, OASIS
Joe Hughes, EPRI

Theme

For Smart Grids and Smart Buildings don’t reinvent—for timely and efficient technology we must select existing work and....

• Repurpose
• Reuse
• Realign

Goals for this Round Table discussion:

• Share context
• Discuss Motives and direction
• Examine eCommerce and Security standards and appropriate domains for use
• Establish action plan for standardization and implementation

Talk about OASIS and other Standards and Specifications such as

• Web services
• XML Vocabularies
• Security
• Messaging
• Transaction management
• oBIX for smart buildings
• WS-Device Discovery
• Distributed Management

Come away with a deeper understanding of how and when we can move Smart Grids and Smart Buildings standards forward to rapidly benefit from broadly deployed practices and standards.

AGENDA

First items total 15 minutes. Brief overview and introduction

• Standards and specs
• IRP issues
• Standards ROI
• SOA and Semantics
• Buildings & evolution
• OASIS Blue Initiative
• Markets

• Facilitated discussion

DC, Service, and Bacteria

Regular readers know I am intrigued by DC (Direct Current) power systems in buildings. This fascination was born while examining a data center UPS system several years ago. The potential efficiencies shouted out to me. This week, I found something new that fueled my interest.

Most consumer devices are DC powered. That brick outside your laptop is to convert AC (Alternating Current) power to DC. Your television has a similar brick built inside it. That annoyingly large plug on your cell phone charger is another AC/DC converter. The digital world is a DC world. The exceptions in your homes are the incandescent lights, and the motors in your appliances: refrigerator, dishwasher, and washing machine.

In commercial buildings, the designers and maintenance staff often refer to building systems and their controls collectively as the low voltage systems. The low voltage systems are powered by DC The controls that manage the air conditioning system and all their sensors are powered by an isolated low voltage DC system. The security system with its window sensors is DC. The video cameras and their network are powered by DC. We live in a DC world.

Several years ago, an APC salesman generated an epiphany as he proudly demonstrated his new data center racks. The racks has built in power conditioning and batteries, and seemed sturdy and well designed. The servers were fed from the batteries at all times, protected from power dips, sags, and spikes by the constant power source. All power coming into the racks was converted into DC and fed into these batteries, keeping them fully charged. The power coming out of the batteries was converted in AC power, and routed into plugs for the servers. Each server, as they usually do, had a plug in the back into a little removable brick, just as in your laptop, converting that power back to DC.

It was the proximity, I guess. I have the same set up supporting the server room at work, but the refrigerator-sized battery is down the hall, invisible during normal operations. Seeing the batteries and the servers so close, I could no longer ignore their absurdity. I was converting power to AC to go a yard to convert it back, losing 10-30% of the power each way, only because it was the way things always were.

Since then, I have paid more attention to DC systems. Since then, I have often wondered how many "almost there" technologies are held back by infrastructure assumptions. How many solar projects, for example, that don't quite make economic sense, are held back by the double tax of DC to AC and back again....

So why this week? Why do I bring this up again?

For the last two mornings I have had the pleasure of breakfast at the B&B with a quiet electrical engineer, unassumingly working on a project I am calling bacteria-powered low-voltage distribution. Much of metabolism can be envisioned as getting rid of electrons to the most available receptor; his company is offering bacteria wires as the as the most available receptor.

He sees his system being used as a third world power source He only needs enough power to light LEDs at night. In many areas wood is burned for light in the evening, contributing to deforestation and reducing the fuel available for other purposes. His company has recently received stage one funding, and is looking for short term revenue in other areas. One potential project is yard lights that are powered by the soil they are pushed into, and that work better than solar for northern latitudes in moist climates.

I got a call from the folks at FreeLight yesterday, to discuss their progress with in-place hybrid installation of DC in existing buildings, and the availability of low power DC lighting. Such lights are programmable to display any color, or even pictures and text. Such lights are very light, with high efficiency, and no local power conversion.

Can such systems work together, moving the power for emergency lighting off the grid and away from batteries? Would labor cost avoidance (maintenance for batteries) be the factor that drives adoption?

Future buildings and local generation are coming. There is no need for future building systems to be powered like those of today. Challenging our power distribution assumptions will be as important as changing our power generation assumptions.

At FIATECH, I spoke on specifying buildings by services, not by technology or process. The engineers at FIATECH agreed that service and performance specifications would free up their creativity and innovation. Energy distribution strategies might be part of that innovation.

Flying home from yet another meeting

No one was sitting in my row on the small three-seat per row plane I left Boston in and I slid over to the windows while keeping my aisle seat. I began typing my thoughts leaving the member meeting of FIATECH, gloomy musings about the day.

We headed out to sea from Logan airport before turning south, as the high-rises along the harbor glittered into light against an orange sunset. The low-lying clouds in the distance made a lilac backdrop to the twinkling lights in the multi-level parking deck as headlights circle inside. Soon the cape was laid out below me, all silver beaches reaching out from the gray forests at twilight.

I put my head down, and began to write about the day. Heather, working the American Eagle flight from Boston to Raleigh is generous with her broad smile, professionally pleasant as she plies the aisle. She offers to refill my water as she returns, the simple generous act of noticing pulling me from my keyboard, and I look up from my typing to see burning gold in the distance, amid broad bands of orange and red above a spit of land running to sea parallel to our flight.

It is the Chesapeake bay, looking empty, as if longing to be explored, and I think of the crabs I have eaten and seafood I have enjoyed from those waters, I think of sailing in that bay, and I wonder if my son, Josh, has learned to sail now that he lives and works in Patuxent, in the Chesapeake just below Washington, and now coming into view.

This sunset just won't quit, although it is deepening now into a darker red, the high clouds making a dramatic dark border with the blue sky which fades from the palest robin's egg to the dark blue of twilight. Down below, the bunched grey tissue paper of the low hanging gradually clouds hides the top of the Outer Banks from view.

Now there is only the low lying clouds the red band above, golden toward the south and the sun, and all the shades of blue above. Now that I have seen it, I am drawn again and again to the window. I am not sure what to make of the conference. Several Board members, including the chair attended my session today.

They were more than supportive. They wished me well. They indicated they would embrace the work when done. It seemed they felt the passion, they acknowledged the import of the work. They gave me the greatest gift of all, that of complete attention for more than three hours, until long into the lunch hour. They understood the value, and embraced it. But in the end, it seemed not a good fit. Maybe they can make some introductions they said. So I leave Boston, weary from the effort, energized by the strong minds and clear visions, but pensive.

Yet there is the Albemarle Sound below. What are those lights? Is that a ferry cutting across the purple-gray waters? I don't know. Soon all is covered again by the lilac clouds, mow making a seamless rolling carpet to the still orange horizon.

Tomorrow, I will think of how to explain it again. Tomorrow, I will think again of standards, and XML, and composability, and far, far too many acronyms, each filled with vital import. Tomorrow I will think of market rules enabled by software surfaces, and of market creation. Tomorrow I will think of building services as generators of business value and new revenue. Tomorrow I will think of standards meetings in Atlanta, and white papers on situation awareness, and emergency response, and business interaction and identity management. Tomorrow I will think of carbon, and transacted energy, and yes, even the distinction between "Green" and "Blue"

But Heather has brought me another glass of water, and another professional smile. The Alligator River, with its large mouth and archipelageous banks has appeared through the clouds, pointing at the horizon, still orange. We turn inland, and Virginia Beach shines in the night.

Life is good, and we live in a good country filled with good people who happily share the gift of service every day. Simple consideration and honest smiles for strangers and the beauty of the world that surrounds us every day are under-appreciated. Sometimes it takes one to make us notice the others. Tonight, I am going to appreciate them. And still the sunset goes on. There. There is a new shade of deep red.

I'm going to watch it until I land.

Highlights from the FIATECH Member Meeting

These have been a couple busy, challenging days at FIATECH, extremely dense in information and conversation. FIATECH is the consortium for the application of IT to Capital Projects. FIATECH was instrumental in the rapid progress of the National Building Information Model Standard (NBIMS). FIATECH is also a national clearing house for information about applying developing technology to construction, including the use of mobile computing and RFID. I am not going to write of either of those today.

FIATECH is home to a far reaching project, now known as IDS-ADI. The IDS (Intelligent Data Sheet) defines coherent collections of data about classes of equipment. These data sheets include ontologically significant metadata to define the contents and meaning of each attribute. ADI project is an effort to complete and deploy systems based upon the ISO 15926 standard describing process control plant and equipment. ADI stands for Accelerated Deployment of ISO 15926. ISO 15926 also includes all 3 dimensional information on system components. These groups merged and you can read about them at www.ids-adi.org.

The team has developed a generic data model and reference data library to manage and store this information, including OWL/RDF supplying ontology for each of the attributes. They now report that other data sets, non 15926 data sets can be stored in the same library. By referencing the RDF, the system can automatically translate between one data set, or group of data sets, into another, mixing and matching until there is a match. This is ambitious work.

The next step for the IDS-ADI team is to re-write the code into what they call the industrial strength version. They want the repository to be strong enough to generate three -dimensional visualizations of the ISO1529 process control systems, with all knowledge still attached, fast enough for someone to respond in an emergency. This moves from ambitious to astonishing. To my OWL and Ontology readers, please drop me a line on what you think of this work.

I am not in the process control world, and I do not work at a chemical plant, so my attention was elsewhere, on the whole series of projects that are missing the same keystones of information. The projects need business oriented definitions of the services provided by building systems and a lightweight, far lighter than BIM, set of abstractions for building information.

Scenario-Based project planning aims to capture and formalize the pre-design goals of capital projects. What are the business deliverables of the project, can we track them, and, perhaps, can use them to judge the project's success. I think these deliverables should include the services the building systems should provide and their performance goals. For example, a high end office space might specify a higher than standard health index to justify higher than market rents. For a green project, the same building might specify lower than normal energy use. The higher than normal rents are part of the business justification of the project, and the performance requirements become overarching design goals for the project, incurring costs, but perhaps also mitigating project risk.

These service performance goals can then become the basis for evaluating the project energy model, effectively commissioning the design. The same goals become the basis for performance contracting of building systems, and of commissioning the building. They also provide a baseline for ongoing building system analytics.

For a business to make any but the smallest response to grid-based signals about energy usage, the business manager must be able to understand the consequences of his decisions. A lightweight BIM could describe which systems and which areas would be affected. The effects would be described in terms of degradation of the business services described above. Knowing, in business friendly terms, what the consequences of decisions would be would free the business manager to make more effective and bigger decisions than he is willing to today.

In emergency response scenarios, information from building systems must be presented up though a lens of simplified structural and use information to provide easily understandable information to the first responder. To support building owners who have security concerns, this information needs to be filtered based upon policy assertions that can be implemented in code. Business rather than engineering experts would apply these assertions to something that must be simpler than the BIM.

Autodesk has indicated some interest in submitting GBXML (Green Building XML) to a standards organization. GBXML is a lightweight derivative of the IFCs in NBIMS used to support energy modeling. The GBXML specification, if promoted to a standard, could perhaps be the lightweight BIM I describe above.

This would leave only the semantic service definition for building services for advancing these projects.